proposed to achieve fame as a novelist.  It was quite simple.  But it turned out to be not at all simple.  The quite provincial young MacDermott cannot make London accept him at his own valuation and his novels are poor stuff.  His wife, loyal to him but still more loyal to the MacDermott clan into which she has married and which now includes a little MacDermott, is the first to recognise that her husband had best seek romance in the family grocery business.  Then the MacDermott himself, with that shrewdness which may be late in coming to an Ulsterman but never fails him altogether, realises it too and the story is finished.

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The main object of the characters in The Courts of Idleness (WARD, LOCK) was to amuse themselves, and as their sprightly conversations were often punctuated by laughter I take it that they succeeded.  To give Mr. DORNFORD YATES his due he is expert in light banter; but some three hundred pages of such entertainment tend to create a sense of surfeit.  The first part of the book is called, “How some passed out of the Courts for ever,” and then comes an interlude, in which we are given at least one stirring war-incident.  I imagine that Mr. YATES desires to show that, although certain people could frivol with the worst, they could also fight and die bravely.  The second part, “How others left the Courts only to return,” introduces a new set of people but with similar conversational attainments.  Mr. YATES can be strongly recommended to anyone who thinks that the British take themselves too seriously.

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=A Burning Question.=

    “The Germans have singed the Protocol.”—­China Advertiser.

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=A Master of Deduction.=

“At 11.30 last night a black iron safe, 22 inches by 18, was found by the roadside at Leaves Green-road, Keston.  When examined it was found that the bottom of the safe had been cut out.  A burglary is suspected.”—­Evening Paper.

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